Reflection on the Semester

My second semester of Media Institutions finished as fast as it started and now I have another possibility to reflect on the course and give you, the readers, the chance to get to know a few interesting findings about this semester’s field trips and journalist visits.

This semester provided us with some new places and personas to get introduced to and get to know what is happening behind the closed doors of Munich’s most well known institutions. Thanks to my luck, I was able to only attend trips that I participated in last semester. Therefore I can not say I learned the most from them, maybe only refreshed my memories.

But a person very much worth mentioning is the Suddeutsche Zeitung’s leading sports journalist Felix Haselsteiner. We had the chance to discuss his work with him at the start of July, where he came to visit us at the IfKW. The hour and a half was filled with topics from the Munich media ecosystem, how fast does the sport journalistic work need to be, especially during times of major sports games, or also his beginnings in Suddeutsche Zeitung. He talked about the struggle students face as you mostly get offered little to no money during internships, having to depend on your parents sometimes long after your graduation. He offered us useful tips to the journalistic field and was surely an inspirational individual to have the opportunity to meet. Thanks to him I got also calmer thinking about being a journalist, as there is still hope people would not get fully replaced by artificial intelligence, but get helped making better quality journalism.

Overall, this course gave me the opportunity to come outside of my comfort zone and be curious, learn and reflect on not only my own work, but also others’. Hopefully we all will succeed in any field we decide to pursue and take at least something from this course to our future work as well. It was a pleasure!